ABSTRACT
This book argues the environmental movement, and from the inner crisis of environmentalism, which is of a peculiar kind: it has been brought on by the inadmissible recognition of essential failure at the heart of success. There is a growing sense of crisis among environmentalists, and not just of the long crisis in human-ecological relations. Acute awareness of that always-worsening situation is now counterpointed by a gathering recognition of deep crisis within environmentalism itself. Environmental language, and to an extent some associated practices, are now common across our institutions, in Britain and increasingly throughout the world. The engagement with wildness as manifested in the outer world, with what lives and acts only from the whole of itself, as natural force, is a necessary form of deep intelligence, without which human beings can't make sense of themselves and are thereby tragically locked into a futile, escapist and destructive progressivism.
